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Google Shipping Pinching Sellers for Q4: How to Keep Your Products on Search

By Tinuiti Team

As if online retailers don’t have enough stress during Q4, Google has been particularly active policing their shipping rules this Holiday season, which may result in products getting removed from search during the busiest online shopping season retailers see all year.

Google enforcing shipping during Q4- which may cause your items to be taken off search.

Google Cracking Down on Shipping During Prime Selling SeasonGoogle Shopping

At CPC, we’ve seen Google aggressively enforcing its shipping rules this month, which is forcing retailers to set up more complicated rules in their Merchant Center.

That’s not to say that retailer’s shipping methods are getting more complex, it’s just the Google is getting stricter about enforcing the submission of accurate shipping costs because they’re now giving retailers more tools to customize how their shipping costs are displayed in the Shopping results.

Unfortunately Google doesn’t allow you to use multiple zip-codes for specific items (at least not yet). For retailers that get flagged with shipping issues, contact  Google immediately. If you have a dedicated account manager,see if you can talk with them to provide you with some work around that will not get you suspended.

Additionally, consider setting up carrier-calculated shipping to avoid any issues with shipping from multiple zip codes.

How to Set Up Carrier-Calculated Rules from Multiple Zip codes

Google sellers with multiple shipping origins cannot  use one carrier-calculated method for Google Shopping. Since Google uses one shipping origin, and incorporates shipping weight in the data feed.
For multiple shipping origins, Google sellers can use a combination of rules, shipping labels, location groups, and carrier-calculated rates from the shared library.
Here is an example of steps to break out  two different shipping origins for Google sellers (split up by East/West) using custom labels:
Paid search Google shopping shipping

1. Create and save 2 carrier-calculated rates for each warehouse in the shared library.

2. Create location groups at the granularity needed for the shipping zone for each warehouse.

3. Use the ‘shipping label’ in feed to group those items that ship from specific warehouses.

4. Now, create a Rules shipping method. In the rules tree:

  • Subdivide by the labels you created for the products that ship from specific warehouses and assign the correct warehouse carrier calculated rate to those labels.
  • Subdivide “everything else” by your location groups and assign the carrier calculated rates from the shared library to the correct group.

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